


Nights

by thomasjeffersonsmacaroni



Series: The Other 51 [46]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-24
Updated: 2017-05-24
Packaged: 2018-11-04 13:32:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10991949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thomasjeffersonsmacaroni/pseuds/thomasjeffersonsmacaroni
Summary: Armitage Hux and Ben Solo co-lead the debate team. But they themselves are enemies both in and out of it.So what happens when they both find their way to a bar at night?





	Nights

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Patrice](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Patrice).



> Me: doesn't ship Kylux  
> Also me: writes this for my beautiful friend whom I love very very much

“Hey, Phaz. What’s the homework again?”

Ben Solo kept his planner open, right hand holding a pen that was hovering above the pages, left hand poking the girl who sat in front of him.

“Don’t call me that,” she hissed, turning around. “And it’s all the even numbered problems on page 118. But Mr. Snoke isn’t collecting it. It’s only for practice for Friday’s test.”

“Well, I think I’ll need it,” Ben laughed.

“I think you will.”

Gwendoline, or “Phasma” (but _not_ “Phaz”) as everyone called her, did not need it. She was probably the most mathematically brilliant person that Ben was friends with, maybe even in the whole school. It was painfully obvious how Mr. Snoke favored her in classes.

Her, of course, and Armitage Hux.

He was in a different period right now; he and Ben only had Spanish and Chemistry together, for which both parties were immensely grateful. Ben thought Armi was uptight and rude, while to Armi, Ben was lazy and quick to his temper. Both impressions were one hundred percent correct, but neither wanted to admit it out of sheer stubbornness.

Ben didn’t even know how long the mutual hatred had lasted. Maybe since elementary school, or maybe even before that. Maybe they had hated each other in the womb. That sounded just about right.

“Are you coming to the debate team meeting today?” Phasma asked, leaning back against her desk.

“Yeah, of course. I’m the vice president. We still need practice before our competition in a month.”

“That’s true. I doubt half of these people know what a rebuttal is.”

“Including Hux.”

Armi was in fact the president of the team, a fact which Ben resented with all of his heart. Phasma sighed and rolled her eyes.

“Ben, have you ever considered going to Hux and just…I don’t know, talking your rivalry out? It’s dragged on for so long that it’s actually goddamn ridiculous. You don’t even have a reason to keep doing this. C’mon.”

“Phaz, he’s insufferable. Do you seriously think that I’m going to go to him and we’re going to be all buddy-buddy because of the magic of friendship? I mean-”

“Don’t call me Phaz. And I’m not saying that you two need to be friends. I’m just saying that after a while, constant fighting gets annoying. Doesn’t exactly do wonders for the sanity.”

Ben’s face twisted into a scowl. “Well, that’s just _too bad,_ now isn’t it?”

“Ben, can you calm down and listen to me?”

“Only if you stop talking about me reconciling with Armi-shit. Not gonna happen.”

Phasma breathed in slowly but said nothing. When the bell rang, Ben grabbed his bag and stormed off without her.

 

When he arrived in the room where they usually met, Armitage Hux was already there, chatting to the team’s secretary slash treasurer, Rey Kenobi. Both looked up, saw Ben’s still-furious face, and knelt back down.

“Solo, I don’t want to get into a fight today,” Armi said when Ben approached him. “We have too much to do. Where’s Phasma?”

“Dunno.”

“Don’t you two usually walk in together?” Rey burst in. “How can you not know where she is?”

Ben was about to dismiss the issue and ask where Poe Dameron, their historian slash PR manager, was, but Armi cut him off.

“Poe’s home sick. Finn’s covering for him. He should be here soon.”

“Finn? I didn’t think he was in the club.”

“He’s not. He just wanted to cover for Poe. Anyway, did you and Phasma get into a fight?”

“None of your business. Can we just begin the meeting already?”

“Not until Finn gets here. Solo, you need to stop fighting with people over the smallest things. We can’t have temper tantrums at the competition. It’ll reflect badly both on us and the school.”

“Can you just leave me alone already? This is a _personal_ issue. It has nothing to do with you. Fuck off.”

“Solo-”

_“SHUT UP!”_

Armi seemed to jump back from Ben’s outburst, and Rey clenched a fist tighter around the pen she was holding.

“Just stop talking about it,” Ben said, tone normal but sounding like a whisper. “Stop.”

Armi looked as if he wanted to say more. But thankfully, the room had fallen into silence.

Ben pulled up a chair to the table at which his fellow two officers had been sitting. All three of them stared at the table until Finn pushed open the door and walked into the room, followed by the four non-officer members, including a frustrated-looking Phasma.

Rey pulled up another table to fit the whole group. Then, Armi pulled out the printed sheet that contained the agenda, and the meeting began.

It was just like any other, except that the fact that it was one of precious few before the competition made the mood more nervous than usual. Fees were handled, the schedule was finalized, and at the end, Ben held up the brackets for the practice debate that he had organized. They had decided about a month ago that they would have one of those at every meeting before the competition.

The practice debate, specifically organized with a focus on rebuttals, was bracketed with a placement of Ben and Armi as far away from each other as possible (Phasma had had a huge hand in making them). But even so, for the final debate, the boys, being the team’s superior debaters by far, were face-to-face.

“Keep civil,” Rey, who was to be the judge, warned. Finn sat next to her and took notes.

Surprisingly, they followed her instructions. The only time when the duo got even remotely close to a fight was during the closing remarks, when they got face-to-face and spoke at a volume about a couple of decibels above normal. But Rey held her phone in her hand and pointed at it – she had the contacts of both Ben and Armi’s mothers – and they pulled apart without another word.

Then, Ben picked up his bag and left in the direction of the parking lot. Armi followed, blissfully silent.

 

That night was a Friday, and Ben’s parents were away on a business trip, so he called Phaz and asked her if she’d like to go to a bar with him. She agreed enthusiastically as soon as he apologized for his behavior, and soon, they were in her car, Finn, Poe, and Rey sitting in the backseat. The latter had only agreed to come along in order to be the designated driver.

The bar itself was packed with people, so packed that the bouncer barely glanced at the group’s fake IDs before letting them in. It was barely any time at all before Ben lost his companions in the crowd.

 _Jesus Christ._ Finding them again probably involved either talking to people or navigating through a crowd of dancing drunks, and Ben didn’t especially want to do either. For a second, he considered calling them, but then he decided that they were probably, unlike him, actually having fun. He didn’t want to be a party pooper.

So he sat at the bar table and sipped his whiskey while looking around, hoping against hope that someone he actually knew would find their way back to him. Blissfully, no one tried to talk to him, but that was probably understandable, as he wasn’t exactly the most attractive person on Earth.

Ben didn’t know how much time passed. Everything seemed to fade away to background noise until he heard a familiar voice cutting through it all.

_“Beeeeeeeen Soooooooooolo?”_

Ben took a breath in and rolled his eyes. The voice was unmistakably Armi’s, but it lacked that inherent snootiness about it, or, at the very least, it was slightly dimmer. It was weird to hear it sound like that.

On second thought, it was even weirder to hear it coming from a bar on a Friday night. Armi had never seemed like the type to go to these kinds of places.

Ben stood up to look around for him and saw him instantly, lurching over to the bar table, holding a broken glass in his hand.

“Ben Solo,” said Armi when they were so close that Ben could smell the drunkenness on his breath. “Ben Solo. Fuck you, Ben Solo.”

“I don’t want to fight you,” Ben whispered. That was probably the first time he had ever said that in his life.

“Fuck you, Ben Solo. Fuck you for making me feel things.”

At this, Ben tilted his head, feigning interest, in the meantime bending down to wrestle the glass out of Armi’s hand.

“You just _strut in_ with your insufferable attitude and your beautiful face and you make me want to kiss you and kill you and oh my god oh my god oh my god-”

“You’re drunk,” Ben murmured, finally managing to wrestle the glass out of Armi’s hand and throw it in the trash.

_He’s drunk. Why else would he be talking about how much he loves me?_

Ben looked at Armi’s tired form, collapsing against his chest, arms wrapping around his body and hanging from his neck. He felt something quickening in his heart, like the beating of a butterfly’s wings, and that something forced him to wrap his arms under Armi’s and pull him up, pushing his head on his shoulder. In this position, Ben pulled out his phone and sent Phasma a single text.

_I have to take Armi home. Sorry I can’t hang out._

“What’s your address?” he asked, leading him outside and opening the Uber app on his phone.

Armi said nothing, only kept muttering about how much he hated Ben for making him love him. Ben himself groaned and typed in his own address.

“You’re staying over at my house,” he told the boy, who said nothing.

The Uber driver arrived in a green car, and he offered Ben a bottle of water and a peanut butter sandwich, both of which he immediately gave to Armi. Apparently, eating and drinking made someone less drunk. Ben really needed “less drunk” right about now.

When they arrived at Ben’s house, he placed Armi on the recliner and unfolded the couch into a bed. Then, with great difficulty, he picked up the slightly smaller boy and placed him on it, gently tucking him in with a blanket and a pillow.

“Good night,” he whispered into his ear. “See you again tomorrow.”

 

The next morning, Ben awoke to Armi tapping him on the shoulder, rubbing his head with exhaustion.

“I’m sorry for whatever I did last night, Solo.”

Ben sat up and wrapped a blanket around himself, blushing at the thought of Armi seeing him in nothing but his boxers. “It’s fine. Let me get you some cereal.”

“Can I ask… _what_ I did? I can’t remember, and it’s driving me insane.”

Ben took out the box of corn flakes and a jug of milk. “You told me that you hated me because I make you love me. You didn’t do anything embarrassing, don’t worry. I let you sleep at my house because I didn’t know your address.”

Armi flushed and looked down at his hand. “I’m sorry. That probably put you in an awkward position. I promise it won’t happen again.”

“But can I ask…?”

“Can you ask what?”

“Can I ask if it’s true? Or was it just drunken rambling?”

Armi clenched his fist around his spoon. “It was. I wasn’t planning on telling you, I was hoping that it would just die out, but…”

He trailed off. In that pause, Ben knelt down and kissed him firmly on the lips, barely even thinking about how or why he was doing it. Armi gasped for a second before kissing back, more passionately than Ben had ever been or ever would be kissed. It was brief, and when they broke apart, they looked at each other in a way they had never looked at each other before.

“Ben.”

“Armitage.”

That was all that they could say in that moment.


End file.
